What Is Digital Forensics?

It is obvious to anyone nowadays that most data today is digitized and only becoming ever more complex. This is what digital forensics is all about: managing and accounting for this digital complexity. It is, in effect, one of the bedrocks of our current internet age. However despite being so crucial, the layperson is generally not at all familiar with what digital forensics even means.

Simply put, digital forensics is the science of identifying, preserving, recovering, analyzing and presenting digital data as evidence. However, it is also a field focused on detecting and eliminating threats to computer software and data. The data analyzed in digital forensics can be stored on computers, mobile devices, or other databases where they need to be accounted for. For example, because most evidence today is digital, digital forensics plays a central role in the courtroom. This expertise is also used to detect malicious malware across devices and networks thus helping to better secure our computers. In short, digital forensics is intertwined with many facets of our modern life.

Because of its usefulness across the board, digital forensics as a field commonly finds itself alongside law enforcement, counterintelligence services, and cyber-defense. Because the scope of its use-cases, it has many sub-categories for investigation.

The Sub-disciplines within Digital Forensics

Digital forensics is a rich field that is constantly evolving. Generally speaking, the field has six major sub-disciplines.

• Computer Forensics: forming the largest sub-discipline within digital forensics, computer forensics is focused on identifying, analyzing, and reporting data found on computers or laptop for investigations.
• Network Forensics: this area of digital forensics is largely concerned with monitoring, capturing, and analyzing the activities on networks to determine security attacks.
• Mobile Device Forensics: with most of our lives currently on mobile phones, specialties have arisen in digital forensics that focus on smartphones, SIM cards, GPS devices, tablets, and gaming consoles.
• Digital Image Forensics: digital images pose a new problem because of their alterability and validating their authenticity is complicated. Recovering an image’s metadata is a core component of digital image forensics.
• Digital Video Forensics: like images, digital video forensics seeks to establish authenticity when it comes to digital recordings.
• Memory Forensics: the smallest sub-discipline, memory forensics is primary concerned with recovering evidence from the RAM of a running computer.

Of course, many of these sub-disciplines overlap and can sometimes be studied in conjunction with one another. For example, examining a computer for evidence might also inadvertently require an examination of that computer’s related mobile devices.

The Process of Digital Forensics

Because the work of digital forensics is primarily to collect evidence, care and strict methodology must be employed so nothing is ever lost. This can be broken down into a few crucial steps.

1. Identify: all digital forensics should start with identification before doing anything else. Where is the data coming from? Where is it stored?
2. Preservation: After recovering the data and clearly outlining where all its fragments are stored, it is time to maintain the data’s integrity. Without this crucial process, collected data as evidence might lose its usefulness completely. Oftentimes, this process involves copying the original data so it is never lost.
3. Recovery: Sometimes, pieces of the data are missing. This is common in criminal proceeding and is becoming more and more crucial to digital forensics since the suspect in question will likely try to erase evidence. Recovering this deleted data often involves exploring temp data, registry or system folders.
4. Analysis: Now that you have identified, collected, and recovered all the data necessary for the case, it is time to apply your investigative expertise and construct a narrative.
5. Presentation: Finally, after the analysis has been conducted and a story has been created to explain the data under consideration, it is time to present this to others outside of your field.

When dealing with network security, however, the methodology behind digital forensics might change and rely more on programs and tools. However, the basic principles outlined above generally apply for all experts within the field of digital forensics.

Popular Digital Forensics Tools Used

Although the act of recovering data for criminal proceedings involves its own tenuous investigative work on the device or computer in question, securing networks is an altogether different process. Forensic analysis tools have been created to better scan and address gaping security holes in networks, recover data for evidence, and make the work of digital forensics that much easier.

Autopsy

One of the most used and trusted digital forensics tools, Autopsy is used by law enforcement, military, and corporate examiners to investigate and recover data on a computer. An end-to-end open source platform, Autopsy boasts many modules. These include timeline analysis, keyword searching, web artifacts (extractions from browsers), and recovering deleted files.

Encase

Encase is a complex investigative tool that covers several areas of the digital forensics process including cybersecurity, criminal proceedings, and government services. Although detailed, Encase has a steep learning curve and its parent company and developer, Guidance Software, holds instructional training on how to use the software. Encase has been used in various court systems such as the investigative work into convicting the BTK Killer and the murder of Danielle van Dam.  

Computer Aided Investigative Environment (CAINE)

CAINE is yet another popular tool used by many organizations today to conduct digital forensic analysis. Built on Linux, it lies somewhere in between Autopsy and Encase in terms of its learning curve. CAINE is most commonly used by digital forensics specialists who are working with malware and security breaches.

Looking to the Future

Digital forensics has its work cut out for it in the coming decades. Not only will speed and volume of networks only continue to exponentially increase, but data will only continue to grow in complexity. This is only rendered more difficult by more sophisticated encryption, obfuscation, and cloaking techniques which make data collection more time-consuming and sometimes downright impossible.

This is why it is crucial that we continue to dedicate significant time to digital forensics’ many sub-disciplines and establish standards in the process. It’s crucial that digital forensics experts begin to develop new tools to support heterogeneous investigations, privacy, and solutions which are exponentially more scalable than what we have today. The secure systems of today could work towards our detriment in the not-so-distant future and it is necessary that digital forensics remains on the cutting edge for fear of exposure to the many threats that exist online. It is by understanding these threats that one begins to realize how crucial digital forensics is to our current information age.